All those who complain about the liberal domination of Hollywood have never come across John Milius. A film school pal of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, Milius had tried to join the Marine Corp, but was turned away due to his asthma. Instead, he channeled his frustrations into both a life-long obsession with firearms (he was paid for “Jeremiah Johnson” in antique weaponry, and has served on the NRA Board of Directors) and making some of the most masculine, testosterone-filled movies of all time, both as an acclaimed writer and as a director. The basis for both Paul Le Mat’s character in “American Graffiti” and Walter in “The Big Lebowski” — the Coens are friends of Milius, and offered him the part of Jack Lipnick in “Barton Fink” — he’s one of film history’s most singular, colorful characters.
He might not have had the overwhelming success of Lucas or Spielberg, but Milius has been behind more than a few seminal pictures of the 1970s and 1980s, and with the man celebrating his 68th birthday this week, we wanted to highlight his place in film history with a few essential movies of the Milius canon.
“Dillinger” (1973)
The honky-tonk beat of “We’re In The Money” lingers over John Milius’ directorial debut. An old-timey standard that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hollywood film of the ’60s, it’s here deployed to register a melancholy hankering for the old times, a bit of a sarcastic fourth-wall-breaking touch by a man to be forever labeled a moviemaking renegade. It would be the beginning of Milius announcing to the world that he was an old soul with decidedly Old Testament viewpoints. “Dillinger” is brutal, muscular filmmaking, centered on the Dillinger gang as if they were an endangered species, forever looking over their shoulders. Every kinetic shootout and action sequence is drenched in sweat and desperation, suggesting these were the last days not only for this overconfident criminal, but also for this station-to-station way of life. The pressure to settle down and live a life without dodging bullets weighs heavily on Dillinger’s dog-faced posse, but not in the eyes of Warren Oates. Here, as the director’s avatar, he’s determined to go down in a blaze of glory with a wad of cash, confident and cocksure but also aware of Melvin Purvis breathing down his back. While there are many not-very-confident choices made in putting the movie together, which is customary considering it was his first time behind a feature film, “Dillinger” is still loaded with surprisingly visceral action and an overwhelmingly bleak tone that suggests that you don’t need to know how the story ends to guess things don’t go well for our title character.
